This past Saturday, I was working with a couple guys, trying to shoot a commercial for submission to the Doritos superbowl ad...

I did one a couple weeks before with my 5D3...working on editing that.

This past weekend another guy that does more pro stuff...brought his XF300.While on location, we actually played back some footage to review...working fine.

I got a call yesterday...they can't get any video off the card...and apparently it doesn't play in camera any more.

Is there any way to 'coax' the data off a card that is being troublesome? I've used some forensic type software in the past, to recover deleted and semi-deleted files off a harddrive...but not sure what the Canon stuff is formatted as, or what utilities or tricks might be out there available.

Suggestions? Links?

We can't get out to reshoot this with deadline, etc...so, if we can't get the footage, we can't get this one together to submit.

I've had lots of issues trying to recover video or raw files from a card with free software. Most of them just recover jpeg files and cannot seem to figure out other file types. I use Lexar Image rescue 4, it recognizes the proper file types, be they video or raw.